At the heart of the Eastwood Mall in Quezon City, Philippines, stands a monument to “the men and women that have found purpose and passion in the business process outsourcing industry.” Ringed by flying steel birds, a man and two women preside over this small patch of Metro Manila, decked out in headsets and briefcases and facing a proud future. Steps away is a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf where Sarah T. Roberts interviewed a group of commercial content moderators for her book, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadow of Social Media. Commercial content moderation, or CCM, describes one of the dirtier jobs on the corporate internet: reviewing and removing violent, racist, and disturbing content posted to social media sites like Facebook and YouTube and in the comments sections of brand-aware websites for consumer products. Such dirty work falls to people like these three cast-iron office workers who do that digital piecework just steps away from the mall.

In Roberts’s telling, the economic and social factors that produce our relatively sanitized experiences online also produce a global class of workers tied to one another by the shared conditions of commercial content moderation: contingency, race-to-the-bottom wages, ever-increasing work speeds and quotas, and exposure to the worst elements of humanity, again and again and again in round-the-clock shifts. Roberts interviews individual workers from the many sectors where content screening gets done: Filipino BPO (business process outsourcing) workers who take CCM jobs when more competitive call-center positions aren’t available; young college graduates in San Francisco whose big tech dreams turn into long-term-temp-worker realities; and American contracting company executives who market their human moderators as American, a xenophobia that feels right at home with contemporary US politics. Some of her informants focus on their own psychological trauma from the content they repeatedly engage. Others lament declining wages, job instability, and the lack of employer benefits as the worst parts of the work. Online, Roberts argues, the pleasure we take in sharing kid photos and memes and online petitions is made possible only by the business-processing workers from Manila to Silicon Valley, all clicking through the dregs of the social web, rendering the space safe from snuff films and child pornography.

Human moderation of online content is not new. In the early days of the web, Roberts recalls from her own experience, moderation was itself a social affair. “Mods” were of and by the communities they moderated, their roles known and respected by participants. Moderation in these contexts was about maintaining and facilitating norms so that the MUD or BBS or Usenet group could function collegially. Everybody knew that moderation was essential to a functional game setting or chat room, and while the early days were certainly not conflict-free, the role and importance of moderators were not in dispute.